More information about people and places mentioned.
Project Glossary
Elias Carter, architect
Elias Carter was a Worcester (MA), architect and house-builder active in central/western Massachusetts in the early 1800s.
His first church commission was at Brimfield (1805), but the building has since been replaced. His Templeton (MA) church, built in 1810, was replicated along a string of meetinghouses extending 60 miles north to Newport (NH) in 1822. His church at Mendon (MA), built in 1820, was also widely copied throughout the area. Both had distinctive steeple designs.
Isaac Damon, architect
Isaac Damon was born in 1781. At age 30, he moved from Weymouth (MA) to Northampton (MA). His wife died the following year, and he married Sophia Strong (pictured), who delivered eight children.
Over the course of his career, Damon built 13 churches, 14 other buildings, and 25 bridges. All of his buildings were constructed in the Connecticut River Valley, but his bridge work took him farther afield. His fully-enclosed bell towers and steeples are easily recognized throughout his region of influence.
He retired in 1852 at the age of 71 and died ten years later.
James Breck, merchant
A 24-year-old merchant of Scottish descent, James Breck moved from Claremont to Croydon (NH) in 1804, the same year that the Croydon Turnpike was chartered. Breck served Croydon as selectman and representative in the state legislature. In 1816, he moved down to Newport and constructed a brick store at the corner of Main and Elm Streets. The structure was removed sometime after April 1979, for road improvements.
Breck belonged to the Congregational Society but was not a church member. Nevertheless, he financed a new meetinghouse, made of brick, on the eastern side of the Sugar River—quite near his own store. Often listed as the highest tax-payer in Newport, James Breck served for many years as selectman and state representative.
In 1842, he moved his large family to Rochester (NY) where new opportunities stemmed from the completion of the Erie Canal. He again opened a mercantile business, which he and one of his sons operated until his death in 1871; the son died just five years later.
James Wheelock, pastor
The Rev. James Ripley Wheelock, grandson of Dartmouth College founder Eleazar Wheelock, served as pastor during the time the brick meetinghouse was constructed. Because the building was financed by James Breck and others on the building committee, the minister and congregation appear to have contributed little to its design. The new building was erected in full view of the 1793 meetinghouse across the river, and Wheelock is reported to have visited the construction site, perhaps often, but he makes no mention of the new meetinghouse in church minutes.
James Wheelock's father practiced law in Hanover (NH), and James practiced law in Royalton (VT) after his graduation from Dartmouth in 1807. In 1816, he quit the law and moved to Middlebury (VT) to study the ministry with the Rev. Thomas Abbot Merrill. Called by the Newport (NH) congregation, James Wheelock was ordained in the old meetinghouse on December 2, 1818. During 1819, he added over 140 new members to the church; among them was his new wife, the former Delia Bass of Middlebury.
After this auspicious beginning, his sometimes irascible and sarcastic nature started to wear thin on neighbors and church members. On February 21, 1823, a council of clergy was convened at Wheelock's own home to consider eleven charges made against him by a faction of church members. After hearing testimony, the council declared the claims unproven but acknowledged that the Rev. James Wheelock probably did possess a "warmth of temper." In any event, his bonds with the Newport congregation had been severed. He was dismissed but allowed to keep the $750 he had received upon accepting the call to settle.
Wheelock's "Farewell Sermon" was delivered on March 2, 1823. The sermon was then published ten days later—on the day before the new, brick meetinghouse was dedicated. Interestingly, the dedication ceremony's program does not identify any participants by name. The officiant was probably Dartmouth's president, the Rev. Bennet Tyler, as previously arranged.
James Wheelock served as interim minister for congregations in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut, before finding missionary work in Indiana, where doctrinal charges led to a trial and dismissal. During that sojourn, three of his children died. In 1838, he became interim minister in Barre (VT), where his wife died after childbirth. A brief, failed second marriage followed, and then Rev. James Wheelock moved to Milton (MA) to preach occasionally.
On November 24, 1841, he died in Boston's Pearl Street House hotel—"happy to leave the world, to him so full of sorrow," according to one biographical sketch. He was 51.
John Leach, carpenter
John Leach was paid $6 for the drawings of the South Church of Newport. He was also paid for raising its timber frame and later waived his design fee. An obscure architect/builder, he left a lasting imprint on our built environment.
John Leach was born in 1778 at Manchester (MA). His family moved along with several others to the southern part of Dunbarton (NH), around 1795. In 1805, he married Nancy Tenney, daughter of local builder William Tenney, who constructed many homes and also the town's meetinghouse. Leach may have worked for Tenney for some period, but one source states that William Tenney left his family over a dispute with his father-in-law, Judge Page, in 1796, several years before Leach’s marriage to Nancy. Dunbarton town records list John Leach as a carpenter but make no other comments about his work.
How did he end up in Newport? One member of South Church’s building committee, Deacon Caleb Heath, had moved to Newport from Bow (NH) in 1800 and may have known Tenney, if not Leach. So far, this seems the most likely connection but lacks evidence. After framing the South Church, Leach built two private homes, one for James Breck and another for Hubbard Newton, before leaving Newport. Within months of the Newport church's dedication in March 1823, John Leach designed and raised an Elias Carter-style church for the Presbyterian congregation in New Boston (NH). He then received commissions for the First Baptist Church and Merrimack County Bank in Concord (NH). Both were brick buildings that repeat certain design elements employed at the church at Newport. In 1827, he built the stone Episcopal church in Hopkinton—a Gothic Revival departure from his earlier work. In 1829, he designed and built the wooden Second Congregational (Unitarian) Church, which burned down while being outfitted for gas illumination in 1854.
By 1850, John Leach had retired and moved with Nancy to Concord; they are listed on both the 1850 and 1860 census for the city's 6th Ward. Perhaps ailing, they reported live-in domestic help on the 1860 census. John Leach, 85, died in Brooklyn (NY) at the close of the Civil War in the spring of 1865. He was residing with his son, Dr. John Leach, and his body was returned to Concord for burial. Nancy Leach died the following year at the age of 82.
Meetinghouse Tragedy in Newport
Artist rendering of the old meetinghouse.
In 1791 the town of Newport purchased property on Unity Road for a new meetinghouse to serve both the town and its Congregational Society. The structure was erected two years later in 1793. Published sources cite different dates, but this transcript of a private letter seems definitive:
Dear Grandmother, I have sad news to write you. Dear brother Charlie is dead. June 26th, Father and Charlie went to Newport to help raise a meeting house. Charlie fell from the building 27 feet, striking his head. He lived only a short time. Father and Mother are so sad; everybody loved Charlie. He was 19 his last birthday. He was brave, and so helpful to Father. He taught school last winter....
Sarah Seamans, daughter of New London's Baptist minister, Job Seamans, related news of the accident. In a journal entry on the first anniversary of the event, the Rev. Job Seamans wrote:
Thursday June 26, 1794 — This day a year ago my son was killed at the raising of Newport meeting-house; upon this day too, they raised their meeting-house in Croydon. This circumstance brought troubles fresh to my mind and I could not avoid another bitter spell of mourning. When will the days of mourning be ended? I felt as though I never should forget this heavy stroke; but I wish I may never murmur against God.
The 1793 meetinghouse served well the town's original settlement west of the Sugar River, but over the next 20 years the center of activity shifted to the eastern side of the river. When the new, brick meetinghouse was constructed in 1822, there appears to have been no dissent: it would be situated along the new turnpike running up the east side. In 1823, the old meetinghouse was sold, moved down the road, and used as a barn.
Newport Brickmaking
At the time of its construction, the South Church must have been Newport's largest man-made structure. Its financial patron, James Breck, no doubt insisted that it be made of brick (as he had done earlier for his own store), and each brick was hand-made from local clay. Local craftsmen laid them by the thousands in order to complete the church.
Edmund Wheeler's "History of Newport" lists several brick-makers, with the earliest dating back to 1776. The Nathan Mudget yard on Sunapee Street, the Wilcox yard on Spring Street, and the yard at the B.W. Jenks place at the corner of Oak and Pine Streets all employed several workers. Smaller makers included David Brown, Clark Emerson, Albert Hurd, and "a Mr. Bachelder made brick in the marsh above the school-house in District No. 14."
John Silver is credited as mason of the early brick buildings in Newport, including the Newport House (1814), the South Church (1823), the Courthouse (1826). Working with him were John Silver Jr., Samuel Noyes, James Carr, Joseph Carr, George Tasker, and J.W. Sargent.
Wheeler makes this rare reference to the actual construction of the South Church:
Samuel Noyes, a brick-mason; son of Deacon Cutting Noyes; was fond of good-natured jokes. While building the Congregational church, which originally had a very large window at the rear of the pulpit, the pastor, Rev. Mr. Wheelock, remarked that it seemed very large; whereupon Mr. Noyes, looking on the assembled crowd, with a knowing wink, retorted—"Pretty much all the light we get from the pulpit we expect will come through that window."
The "Templeton Run"
The meetinghouse at Templeton (MA).
"Templeton Run" was a term used by Peter Benes of Boston University in his 1978 study of geographic patterns in New England church architecture. While it is common to see clusters of similarly-designed churches, he observed a more linear dispersion for a particular, distinctive design.
The double-octagon steeple at Newport's South Church establishes the building as the northernmost member of the Templeton-style churches.
The first in the group was designed by Worcester (MA) architect Elias Carter and dedicated in 1811 at Templeton (MA). From that point the design was carried, with modifications, northward 60 miles through western New Hampshire over the span of a dozen years. Elias Carter did not build these other structures, but towns dispatched building committees to study and adapt his design, and some of the same craftsmen migrated from one site to another.
The official Templeton-derived meetinghouses are located at Troy (NH), Fitzwilliam (NH), Dublin (NH), Hancock (NH), Acworth (NH), and Newport (NH). Of these, Fitzwilliam is the prime example. The Troy meetinghouse, now the town offices and fire station, has undergone major changes. The Dublin meetinghouse was demolished in 1852. All the others are immediately recognizable as you travel through southwestern New Hampshire. In 2008, only the meetinghouses at Templeton, Hancock, and Newport offered year-round religious services; Acworth is used during the summer months. Troy, Fitzwilliam, and the lower portion of Hancock house their respective town offices.
The Presbyterian church at New Boston (NH), dedicated on December 25, 1823, was omitted from the published "Templeton Run." This wooden structure mirrored the church at Acworth, but retained Newport's altered steeple—no coincidence, as the Newport and New Boston edifices shared the same master builder. The New Boston meetinghouse was destroyed by lightning in 1900, many years after its congregation had abandoned it.
The 1775 meetinghouse at Jaffrey (NH) saw a new tower addition topped by a Templeton-style steeple in 1823, and the 1762 Park Hill Meetinghouse in Westmoreland (NH), having been moved in 1779, was expanded and retrofitted with a Carter-style porch and steeple (minus one octagonal stage) in 1826. Built a few years later, churches in Framingham (MA) and Sutton (MA) also exhibit elements found among the Templeton group, perhaps a reflection of their common indebtedness to the pattern books of Asher Benjamin.
See the locations and dispersion of Carter-inspired churches at Google Maps.
William Cheney, merchant/industrialist
Born in Alstead (NH) in 1776, William Cheney moved to Newport in 1807. His first store was located in the Enoch Noyes house, west of the Sugar River. He built the Richards Block east of the river in 1810 and relocated his business. He then built Nettleton's Hotel and the Tontine, a huge, wooden building with stores and mechanic's shops. During 1815, he constructed dams and several mills. Four years later he purchased the water rights at the Sunapee Harbor outlet and built saw-, grist-, and carding-mills there.
A deacon, he provided the land for a new Baptist church, built in 1822. Working with James Breck, he established Newport as the seat of the newly-formed Sullivan County, ensuring a steady business for the town's hospitality industry as people traveled to Newport to conduct their legal affairs.
William Cheney died of consumption in 1830. His business interests were assumed by his sons, most of whom left Newport within a few years of his death. Cheney's youngest son, James Edwin Cheney, then in his early twenties, started a mercantile in Rochester (NY) where James Breck had also resettled in 1842. A coincidence?